i should be writing

The system intrinsically abuses poor people.

Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s new ballet, based on the life of one of the first modern lesbians, is changing how dancers view their traditional roles.

by Laura Cappelle - The New York Times, March 2, 2026

One morning last August, the female dancers of Northern Ballet tried something most of them had never done before: partnering each other.

In one of the company’s studios in Leeds, England, there were giggles and some near falls. Carefully but eagerly, the dancers tried to steady their partners on pointe — in ballet, usually the task of men. By lunchtime Federico Bonelli, the director of Northern Ballet, was demonstrating the correct way to hold out an arm for support — palm up, not too close to the body, at bellybutton level — to women in line for coffee.

“It’s the opposite,” said the dancer Nida Aydinoglu, 20, miming how she usually gives her hand to a male partner, palm down.

“It’s just a new technique,” Bonelli replied with a smile.

Six months later, Aydinoglu and her female colleagues are now flying through closely entangled lifts and turns — and will soon showcase them in a landmark new work that premieres on March 7 at Leeds Grand Theater: “Gentleman Jack,” Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s adaptation of the 2019 television series about Anne Lister, a 19th-century English landowner known as one of the first modern lesbians.

For most of ballet history, heterosexual romance has been the default. Telling Lister’s story is a quiet revolution. Openly queer characters are a rarity in the art form’s repertoire, and allusions to romance between women are always fleeting: a scene in Bronislava Nijinska’s 1924 ballet “Les Biches”; a pas de deux in Roland Petit’s “Proust” half a century later; a kiss in Wayne McGregor’s “Woolf Works,” a 2015 production inspired by Virginia Woolf.

Rachael Gillespie, foreground left, and Gemma Coutts in a rehearsal for “Gentleman Jack.” Sophie Stafford for The New York Times

By contrast, Lopez Ochoa offers an intimate, in-depth look at Lister’s relationships with two of her long-term lovers: Mariana Lawton, who has chosen to be married to a man over staying with her, and Ann Walker, a local heiress whom she “marries” in a secret, symbolic ceremony. Both women are described at length in Lister’s diaries, which were partly encrypted to hide her sexuality.

“To actually have a ballet centered on a queer woman — that’s a really radical shift,” said Clare Croft, a dance historian and theorist at the University of Michigan, and the dramaturg for “Gentleman Jack.”

The idea came to Bonelli, he said, after he was appointed to lead Northern Ballet in 2022. The company of 36 dancers has long specialized in storytelling, and boasts a repertoire of original ballets inspired by literary works and historical figures, like David Nixon’s “Wuthering Heights” and Cathy Marston’s “Victoria,” based on Queen Victoria.

Yet Bonelli wanted to diversify the stories ballet often tackles, and “Gentleman Jack” “felt right in so in so many ways,” he said in February. In Yorkshire, the English region that is home to Northern Ballet, Lister is also a local celebrity: Her estate, Shibden Hall, is about a 20-minute drive from Leeds and open to the public for visits.

When Bonelli pitched the idea to Lopez Ochoa, an in-demand Belgian Colombian choreographer who has created a number of biographical ballets, her answer was a resounding yes. Her interest in gender fluidity had already led her to develop a script with the writer Luke Jennings for a ballet adaptation of “The Danish Girl,” the 2015 film inspired by the life of the pioneering transgender woman Lili Elbe.

But no ballet company wanted to produce it, Lopez Ochoa said, adding: “They told us, ‘We think our patrons wouldn’t want that.’”

Left, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, the ballet's choreographer. Sophie Stafford for The New York Times

She could relate to Lister’s struggle with gender norms. Lopez Ochoa “wanted to be a boy” growing up in Belgium, she said, and struggled with ballet’s expectations of dainty femininity throughout her training as a dancer. “I wanted to be taken seriously,” she said, “to have a voice.”

In “Gentleman Jack,” the women performing Lister’s role have had to undo some of their classical training, too. For most of the ballet, they are in flat shoes rather than the more unstable pointe shoes, to allow them to be more grounded. They also wield canes and have gotten sore arms from lifting their partners, albeit not overhead. “The more you allow yourself to take space, the better it is,” Lopez Ochoa told them in rehearsal.

To help the dancers, Croft, the dramaturg, showed them video compilations of the commanding walk developed by Suranne Jones, the British actor who played Lister on television. “She looks like she’s always on a mission,” said Gemma Coutts, a 24-year-old dancer who is set to dance Lister on opening night. Instead of stretching her feet elegantly, Coutts had to think “heel-toe”: “I’m not just wafting off the stage,” she said. “I’m going from A to B.”

For Coutts, who said she usually gets “nervous and shy in front of a lot of people,” playing the unapologetic Lister has been confidence boosting. “Gemma has come out of her shell,” said her colleague Julie Nunès, who plays Ann Walker.

The women of Northern Ballet have also embraced portraying same-sex romance. “I think they are less prude than I am,” Lopez Ochoa said with a laugh. Coutts said that she was a little anxious at first about kissing a woman, but the feeling went away fast. “Female or male now, I realized that I’m just acting,” she said, pointing out that gay men in ballet companies “have to pretend like they’re in love with women all the time.”

For “Gentleman Jack,” Lopez Ochoa, who is straight, put together a creative team that included several members who identify as queer. Croft, who grew up taking ballet classes and later edited a book on queer dance, was especially elated. “Ballet is my first dance love, but the codes of chivalry are so deep in it,” she said. “When it shows up in relation to queerness, it tends to focus more on the men.”

Gillespie, center, as Ann Walker, whom Anne Lister “marries” in a secret, symbolic ceremony. Sophie Stafford for The New York Times

Initiatives like #QueerTheBallet, a collective started by Adriana Pierce to bring queer women and nonbinary artists together during the coronavirus pandemic, have improved visibility in recent years. Pierce, a former New York City Ballet dancer who is now a choreographer, said she has gone “from being the only person I knew to meeting people every day in the New York dance scene who are young and queer.”

Still, challenging ballet’s gender binary through choreography takes the kind of research and time that mainstream ballet rarely provides. “I don’t see a lot of larger companies investing in specifically queer voices and stories, or even anything that’s different,” Pierce said. Queer retellings of ballet stories have come instead from independent artists, like Kade Pyle, who has produced queer versions of classics including “Giselle” and “The Sleeping Beauty” through her company, Ballez.

By contrast, an established company like Northern Ballet, which tours widely around Britain, can bring a story like Lister’s to “a massive audience,” said Croft, who described the “civic function” of the art form: “People take pride in their ballet companies.” One worry for Bonelli was that the male dancers of Northern Ballet would have little to do in a production like “Gentleman Jack,” with only two soloist roles for them. But Lister “lived in a man’s world,” Lopez Ochoa said, and throughout the ballet, she squares off against businessmen to defend her financial interests, as she did in real life.

The men haven’t complained. “People are interested that the company is willing to take this direction,” the dancer George Liang said. “And having a strong woman challenge me onstage is so much fun.” Aydinoglu, who performs the role of Lister, commented with a laugh: “I’ve really enjoyed bossing the men around, I’m not gonna lie.”

“The more you allow yourself to take space, the better it is,” Lopez Ochoa told dancers in rehearsal. Sophie Stafford for The New York Times

Northern Ballet hosted an open rehearsal in January to gather feedback from women from Calderdale Friends of Dorothy, a social support group for lesbians, and a handful of younger queer women. They took their role to heart: In the discussion afterward, a sensual pas de deux between Lister and Walker came under criticism because Lopez Ochoa had opted to have two men — embodying genderless “words,” a reference to Lister’s diaries — carry the women aloft in the scene.

“One of them said, ‘You cannot put men into an intimate moment between two women,’” Lopez Ochoa recalled. “I let it simmer. Then I thought, I have to fix it.” Now, the women are alone onstage.

The group of queer women who sat in on the rehearsal were “blown away,” said Rachel Lappin, the Anne Lister program coordinator for Calderdale Council, who organized the outing. “One member commented that it was the best day out she’d had in decades.”

Support for “Gentleman Jack” has also translated into “incredibly successful” fund-raising for Northern Ballet, Bonelli said. Last year, the project, which is co-produced by the Finnish National Ballet, won the Fedora - Van Cleef & Arpels Dance Prize, a prestigious European award that supports the development of innovative stage productions. A crowdfunding campaign that runs alongside the prize “not only met but surpassed its target,” Edilia Gänz, the director of Fedora, said in an email.

Ahead of the premiere, the dancers of Northern Ballet say the effects of embodying Lister’s bold individuality are already felt. “As a woman, you often try to blend in, even in real life,” Aydinoglu said. “It’s been really, really different to just be my own person. At the end of the day, you don’t need to please everyone.”

And for queer women in dance, “Gentleman Jack” is a special milestone. When asked about it, Croft paused, visibly moved.

I thought y'all might like to see Niagara Falls lit up for Pride.

I Am Not Your Asian American Doll: a comic for AAPI Heritage Month 2023

I usually spend a lot of time editing and fine-tuning my comics so that they come across as polite and inoffensive. But honestly, I’m really tired of the way Asian cultures and countries are treated / talked about while Asian people themselves are excluded, and thought it was about time I really let my rage out lol.

My main inspiration was the work of feminist artist Barbara Kruger, who you may know from “your gaze hits the side of my face” and “you construct intricate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men.” I wanted to pair really shocking, striking words with high-contrast monochrome images as she did.

I chose eyes (and lack thereof) as a central motif. In conversations about art and media history, the “gaze” of the audience is a way to exert power. Who is made into the passive subject, and who gets to be the all-seeing viewer? Who is the subject being portrayed for? Hiding the Asian figures’ eyes demonstrates their lack of agency and establishes them as the subject rather than the viewer.

The skyline on page 5 includes Namsan Tower, as some readers pointed out. (You may have also been clued in from the page’s respective alt text, which describes this as the Seoul skyline.) Though numerous Asian countries have been victims of imperialism several times over, Korea was specifically in mind here. It was Western powers who Korea was split into the North and South, and their colonization and exploitation has led to extreme poverty even today, despite the country’s glamorous facade and rising international stardom.

As many guessed, pink was chosen for its association with sexualization and femininity, although of course fetishization of Asian cultures affects all genders. I also wanted to pick a dark, shocking pink that reminded the viewer of blood; in fact, it is used to color blood here on page 6. I was really happy that the color palette was limited but still legible. (But drawing the large food spread on page 4 with only three shades of pink was definitely a huge challenge.)

Here are some thumbnail sketches I made when planning the comic. You can probably recognize some of the final pages — and see how others evolved!

I want to thank everyone for their overwhelming support for this comic. I never could have dreamed of such an amazing response. To my Asian siblings across the world, you made me feel less alone. To non-Asian allies who lent me their ear, thank you so much for standing with us and listening to our struggles.

Usually I’m extremely careful to write my comics in a palatable tone, but for this piece I decided to not restrain my anger. I understood that by making this decision I would be sacrificing readership, and that many people would be much less willing to listen to me because of my tone. Nevertheless, I truly believe that any and all of the harassment I received was a small price to pay for such an honest piece to be seen.

Thank you all, again! Please consider supporting my most recent fundraising project, an Inumaki Toge themed fundraiser for aid in Gaza.

Come on [tumblr] where’s my Mars Bear fanart?